Who is the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition?

Our mission is to reverse the trend of mass incarceration in Colorado. We are a coalition of nearly 7,000 individual members and over 100 faith and community organizations who have united to stop perpetual prison expansion in Colorado through policy and sentence reform.

Our chief areas of interest include drug policy reform, women in prison, racial injustice, the impact of incarceration on children and families, the problems associated with re-entry and stopping the practice of using private prisons in our state.

Monday, November 23, 2009

Infozine
By Greg Flakus - Drug smuggling gangs in Mexico have turned some parts of that country into a war zone. At the same time, arrests for drug offenses in the United States have soared, contributing to a jail population that is the highest in the industrialized world. Experts on the narcotics issue came together for a discussion of legalization and other ideas at the Baker Institute at Rice University in Houston Thursday.
Houston, TX - infoZine - The question before the panel was whether legalization of cannabis, commonly known as marijuana, would help reduce the power of the violent Mexican crime cartels. But the discussion also included the idea of legalizing other narcotics or changing the legal approach to the problem they pose.

Speaking in favor of legalization was Ethan Nadelmann, Executive Director of the New York-based Drug Policy Alliance."I think the notion of taking certain psychoactive substances, certain plants and chemicals and treating those as criminal and treating anybody who touches them or uses them, consumes or sells or buys or grows them as criminal is basically wrong. It is wrong and especially for people whose only offense is to take those things into their body," he said.

Nadelmann argued that the so-called war on drugs being carried out by the US government is not really a war at all, but an ill-advised attempt to control behavior that has existed in human society for thousands of years. He says criminalization of drugs has put hundreds of thousands of otherwise lawful citizens in prison and provided criminal gangs with large profits.

But the Intelligence Chief for the Houston office of the Drug Enforcement Administration, or DEA, Gary Hale said efforts to stop drug trafficking do amount to a war. "To me, it is a drug war. It is a conflict that is marked by death and, certainly, threats to our national security. A significant number of terrorist organizations partially fund their activities with drug proceeds," he said.

Hale noted that leftist guerrillas in Colombia are largely funded by taxes they impose on cocaine growers and that the Taliban in Afghanistan benefits from opium production there.

Hale stressed that his job is to enforce the laws, not to make them, but he challenged the idea that legalization of marijuana or any other drug would have a great impact on Mexican criminal gangs like the Zetas, who operate along the US-Mexico border. "If you look at their revenue sources, which are drugs and prostitution and alcohol sales and petroleum theft and just a whole range of stuff the Zetas are involved in, drugs is a very small part, 15 to 20 percent," he said.

2 comments:

Anonymous
said...

About the only thing Mr. Hale really knows is that he gets a big salary and a job from the dryg runners. If the drug running stopped he wouldnt have a job. His job is at the expense of thousands of people who he helped lock up. His job depends on taxes collected. Typical buerocrat who is destroying our society and our country. djw